Michael Hudson, Professor of International Relations at Georgetown University, has written a lengthy essay reflecting on the current wave of Arab protests. It ends with a series of challenges for Middle East analysts: five points of "conventional wisdom" that need to be re-examined. They are:

(1) The "durability of authoritarianism". How valid now is the argument that mukhabarat states can keep several steps ahead of societal opposition through better access to and use of new technologies of information and repression? 

(2) Democratisation is an inappropriate goal and impossible to achieve in the Arab world. Were the so-called "demo-crazy" analysts really so blinded by their presumed liberal preferences? 

(3) Populations are passive – anaesthetised by the opium of the rentier state or bowed down by the burdens of daily life or cowed by fear of the mukhabarat. How then to explain the extraordinary massive popular protests? 

(4) Arab nationalism is dead; people are reverting to their primordial affiliations. But how then to explain the so-called "contagion effect" of the Tunisian and Egyptian upheavals? Facebook alone did not cause them. 

(5) The Middle East regional system is essentially stable; states still are the prime units; the regional balance of power is stable; and the system is still encased in American hegemony. But how then to explain the strategic setback suffered by the United States and Washington’s apparent inability to manipulate the new situation.

These are important questions that readers may like to reflect upon. I won't comment on them myself just now, except to say that we should be wary of trying to fit things into old frameworks. For example, I think it's fair to say that Arab nationalism, in the old anti-colonial sense, is pretty much dead and that people are probably not "reverting to their primordial affiliations". Instead, we are seeing a revival of Arab consciousness, with a stronger feeling of shared identity. Call that nationalism if you like, but it's different in character from traditional Arab nationalism.

Meanwhile, I shall be presenting some of my own reflections on the Arab uprisings in a talk at York University on Wednesday and I'll also post them here later in the week.